14 CHARACTERS OF THE REFORMATION
known as Holland) still maintained itself with
difficulty against its lawful Sovereign, the King
of Spain. But, in Europe as a whole, the tide
was setting for a restoration of Catholicism,
which might have been universal. In England
such a restoration was rendered more difficult
by the character of James Fs reign (1603-25);
in France it was rendered more possible by the
character of the contemporary French King
(Henry IF} who was assassinated in 1610. It
is with these two that the story of the drawn battle
in the seventeenth century opens. It is Henry IV
of France yielding to the pressure of Paris, that
saved Catholicism in that country. James I
of England, guided and " run " by the second
Cecil, William Cecil's son, Salisbury, was the
man under whom, at the critical moment, England
was prevented from becoming Catholic again.
Next, the Emperor Ferdinand in Germany
set out on a kind of crusade for establishing his
own authority, which had dwindled so much in
the past; and at the same time for spreading
Catholicism again in the parts of Germany
where it had been lost. Though Catholicism
in France had been saved yet the French had
always lived in dread of the power of the Germans
of the Empire to the east of them. Therefore,
when it looked as though the Emperor Ferdinand
was going to become the very powerful monarch